By: Hayden Low

The best businessman I know is three feet tall, has a tiny vocabulary, and loves to tinker with trains. Unlike other businessmen, he is not afraid to fail over and over again.

Brewing in his lemonade stand are the ingredients for a successful business. He talks to everyone that walks by him, compliments their crazy hair, and spills lemonade when he pours. That woman on the phone walking by his stand would be unapproachable to the average rule-laden citizen, but our entrepreneurial  four-year-old sees the perfect opportunity. “I like your red shoes,” says the kid, and the ice is broken as he drops the ice cubes in the glass and hands it her way. “Keep the change,” she responds. The fact that he has yet to flip a profit is not a problem: You can bet money on him being out tomorrow, putting his all into his tiny trade.

LEARNING TO FAIL

Through, his monumental experiment, Tom Wujec proves the importance of failing.¹ Participants are given “20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string,” one jumbo marshmallow, and 15 minutes.² At the end of the 15 minutes, the team with the tallest tower is the winner.

Out of all the participants, kindergartners performed better at this experiment than adult participants with MBAs. How did this happen?

It turns out, kindergartners built taller towers because they weren’t afraid to fail. They find the broken links in their system and find ways to fix them. In business, we become so accustomed to the systems that are already developed, that we are scared to break them, to test their limits, and to grow. In order to build a taller tower or a better business, we must learn to fail.

The kindergartners in the spaghetti experiment weren’t stressed about how well they did or how they compared to their peers—they were just playing and having fun. They didn’t make the mistake of the adult participants, choosing a leader and planning what they were going to do. The kindergartners started building their tower and through trial and error, they ended with the tallest towers. By finding what didn’t work (i.e. failing), they were quickly able to make the corresponding adjustments early to prevent further destruction.

Learn to be comfortable with failure.

HAVING FUN

In his book How to get Ideas, Jack Foster explains that “fun [comes] first; the better work, second. Having fun unleashes creativity. It is one of the seeds you plant to get ideas.”³ By making things more fun, we become more creative. We feel less bound to the monotony of everyday work and we can be excited to experiment and be ourselves. Foster states, “forget what was done before. Break the rules. Be illogical. Be silly. Be free. Be a child.”

High performance tech companies know this theory to be true. As one Google employee reports, “the work environment is laid back, and less competitive than others. It really allows room for creativity.” Business Insider also reveals Google offers their employees “on-site massages, free fitness classes and gym memberships, and a generous vacation plan that help employees unwind.”⁴

On the other hand, some first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs report “working more than 95 hours a week on average, sleeping just five hours a night and enduring workplace abuse. The majority of them say their mental health has deteriorated significantly since they started working at the investment bank.”⁵ This is unsustainable and counterproductive. Having fun encourages creative thinking and positive changes within the workplace.

Children are carefree, energetic, and generally stress-free. Stress stops people from having fun like Goldman Sachs’s analysts. The child that is selling lemonade is having the time of his life: talking to people, spilling lemonade, giving the wrong change,  and smiling bigger and bigger with each sale.

ASKING QUESTIONS

An article by Shaunna Smith and Danah Henriksen, assistant professors at Texas State University and Arizona State University, shows how a fixed mindset can lead to limited growth, feelings of inadequacy, and decreased confidence, even when all goes wrong. “Unfortunately, the fixed mindset is commonly cultivated in education, in how we approach mistakes, grades, and failures. This is problematic for creative practice and development.”⁶

In order to change this, we must rewire our trained way of thinking. Jack Foster poses some simple questions to change our way of thinking: “‘How would I solve this if I were six years old?’ ‘How would I look at this if I were four?’”

Children don’t think like adults—they think with their emotions and feelings.⁷ Children question everything and are constantly learning.

Within a business, we tend to ignore our emotions, as they can seem immature and inappropriate. However, as seen in children, emotions bring about great actions. If something is truly bothering us, we will do everything we can to make it more manageable.

Asking the question, “what bothers me?” can be the beginning of making simple changes to make your business more effective.

The hardest thing about growing up is we stop asking questions. We begin to assume that things are the way they are for a reason, that there are no alternatives, and that things cannot be done any other way. These assumptions can create a massive roadblock in our creative thinking. We accept the annoyances in our businesses. The problem with this train of thought is that we lose the childlike ability to create new products the more . This is why we need to ask questions. It will help us to find flaws in the system and make appropriate changes.

We can ask ourselves questions such as: “Why do we use Excel?” “Why are our employees more talkative during lunch break?” “Why are your meetings a certain way?” “Why does your product look the way it does?”

Do yourself a favor, ask MORE questions.

CONCLUSION

Let us remember our first lemonade stand. We made many mistakes, we were bold and curious, we asked lots of questions, and we had lots of fun! Our businesses will grow in ways we never thought they could as we implement these three child-like lessons into our grown-up world.

Learn to fail. Have fun. Ask questions.

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Sources:

1. TED, “Build a tower, build a team | Tom Wujec,” YouTube Video, 7:22, April 22, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_yKBitO8M

2. Furr, Nathan. “Why Kindergartners Make Better Entrepreneurs than Mbas: And How to Fix It,” August 9, 2011. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/04/ 27/why-kindergartners-make-better-entrepreneurs- than-mbas-and-how-to-fix-it/?sh=6feca7501394.

3. Foster, Jack. How to get Ideas. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007.

4. Gillett, Rachel. “5 Reasons Google Is the Best Place to Work in America and No Other Company Can Touch It.” Business Insider. Business Insider, April 28, 2016. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-is- the-best-company-to-work-for-in-america-2016- 4#some-employees-say-their-job-is-low-stress-5.

5. Morrow, Allison. “Goldman Sachs Analysts Say They Work 95-Hour Weeks and Endure ‘Inhumane’ Treatment.” CNN. Cable News Network, March 18, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/investing/goldm an-sachs-analyst-workplace/index.html.

6. Smith, Shaunna, and Dannah Henriksen. “Fail Again, Fail Better: Embracing Failure as a Paradigm for Creative Learning in the Arts.” Taylor & Francis Online, 1 Mar. 2016. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00043125.2 016.1141644?casa_token=Z7esxKk0LIEAAAAA%3ALy BkUgmCnhC-14InbTtETVnkjKJer0w_VOJjowV1QavQqRqqRyHy4EARSQ_fBzxpYRkWdbLPZ00RyQ&.

7. Werner, Craig. “A Blind Child’s View of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature 12 (1984): 209-doi:10.1353/chl.0.0031.